The Debacle - Emile Zola [73]
‘Christ Almighty! Christ Almighty!’
He ran to a near-by fountain, filled his messtin with water and came back and bathed the other’s face. Then, with no concealment this time, he took the last biscuit out of his pack, the one he had saved so jealously, broke it up into small pieces which he poked into Maurice’s mouth. The famished man opened his eyes and devoured the food.
‘But what about you?’ he suddenly remembered, ‘Haven’t you had anything, Jean?’
‘Oh, I’m all right, I’ve got a tougher hide than you and I can wait. A good drink of frog juice and I shall be right as rain.’
He had filled the messtin again and he drank it off in one gulp, clicking his tongue. But his face, too, looked as pale as death, and he was so tortured with hunger that his hands were shaking.
‘Off we go! Come on boy, got to rejoin the others.’
Maurice let himself be carried away like a child. No woman’s arms had ever held him as close and warm as this. In the collapse of everything, amidst this utter misery, with death staring him in the face, it was an ineffable comfort to feel another person loving him and looking after him; and possibly the thought that this heart that was all his belonged to a simple man, a peasant who had never left the land and whom at first he had looked on with distaste, now added a wonderful tenderness to his gratitude. Was this not the brotherhood of the earliest days of the world, friendship before there was any culture or class, the friendship of two men united and become as one in their common need of help in the face of the threat of hostile nature? He heard his own humanity beating in Jean’s breast, and so he was proud on his own account to feel him there, stronger, helping, devoting himself. And Jean, who did not analyse what he felt, found a great joy in protecting in his friend the refinement and intelligence that were still so rudimentary in himself. Since the violent death of his wife in a dreadful tragedy, he thought he had no heart, he had sworn never again to look at those creatures on whose account a man suffers so much, even when they are not being evil. And so friendship became a sort of broadening out for both of them: they might not kiss, but they touched each other’s very souls, the one was part of the other, however different they might be, on this terrible road to Remilly, one upholding the other and the two of them making a single being in pity and suffering.
As the rearguard was leaving Raucourt the Germans were entering it at the other end, and two of their batteries were set up at once on the heights to the left and started firing. At that moment the 106th on the road going down beside the Emmane was in the line of fire. A shell brought down a poplar on the river bank and another buried itself in a field near Captain Beaudoin, but did not explode. But all the way to Haraucourt the gorge went on narrowing, and they wormed their way into a narrow corridor dominated on both sides by wooded crests, and if even a handful of Prussians were in ambush up there disaster was certain. Bombarded from the rear and with the threat of a possible attack from right and left, the troops could not help advancing with ever increasing anxiety, and were in a great hurry to get out of this dangerous pass. This inspired a final burst of energy even in the most exhausted. The same soldiers who just before had dragged their feet from door to door in Raucourt were now stepping out quite perky and revived under the stinging lash of peril. Even the horses seemed to realize that a minute lost might have to be paid for very dearly. The head of the column must have reached Remilly when there was a sudden halt to the march.
‘Fuck it all!’ said Chouteau. ‘Are they going to leave us standing here?’
The 106th had not yet reached Haraucourt, and the shells were still raining down.
As the regiment was marking time, waiting to set off again, one exploded to their right which fortunately did not wound anyone.